SAN FRANCISCO, NEW YORK, BEIJING

I hear the kids playing from the daycare two doors away.  Their shrill chatter and screaming are getting on the one nerve that I have left this morning.  I remind myself that they are children and they’re playing, having fun.

The sky is overcast with the storm still yet to come.  It is stubborn, not yielding, not wanting to let go of the rain.  Days like these grate on me.  They remind me of New York and Beijing.  Seems like their skies are always grey with smog – especially in Beijing.

photo from google search

When you washed your face at the end of the day, the cloth ended up grey.  And when you rinsed your clothes in the hotel sink, the water got sooty.  Good thing I was only visiting then.  I could not live in a place with no blue sky. At the time of my visit, before the Olympics, their freeways were lined with potted plants to absorb the pollution.  Did they make any difference?  Who knew but they tried.

There must have been some clear days and blue skies in New York way back in l969.  The greyness was probably just in my memory and a false one at that.  It was no fun being suddenly uprooted in your teens or at any age.  I fought it and won in a sense.  I came back to Canada by myself for university in Saskatoon at the end of the summer.

After I finished high school, my family moved to New York City where my mother’s side of the family lived.  I spent a long, lonely summer there.  My mother found work in a garment factory, my father at a restaurant.  Sometimes my younger sister went with my mother to snip loose threads from the garment pieces.  She was more happy go luck and flexible in nature than me.  I didn’t remember how my little brother spent the days.  I read books my cousin, Edmund took out from the library and listened to the radio.

To this day when I hear,

If you’re going to San Francisco
Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair
If you’re going to San Francisco
You’re gonna meet some gentle people there

photo from Wikipedia

it reminds me of NYC, the heat from the sidewalks, the traffic noises, the drilling and hammering on Mott Street.  Music and sounds can last a life time.  Do you know that?